theamericans | Episode discussion post: "The Great Patriotic War"

Well. Philip sure had a hell of a day. He was (IMO) honeypotted by his own wife which was followed the next morning by her telling him that he had to set up an innocent kid to be kidnapped and threatened/condemned to a life in a Communist prison (and more likely just killed). Then his own arrogant, idiot daughter implied that he’s a loser who couldn’t handle the rough stuff, prompting him to pick her up and slam her into a wall in the hopes of knocking some sense into her (nope!), and then, on top of all of that, he found out that his wife just slaughtered two people and left their bloody corpses to be found by a 7 year old child. Somewhere during all of that -- and I think it was Stan telling him about the 7 year old finding his dead bloody parents -- Philip finally found the line that he would not cross and made his decision to oppose Elizabeth and put a stop to whatever it is that she is doing. He chose the side of decency. Maybe he managed to save Kimmy when he told her goodbye. I’m doubtful that he managed to save Paige.

And speaking of Paige, I’m so glad that Philip knocked her down several pegs and showed her just how ridiculously self-deluded she has become but without actually saying so in words. “You’re not in to what me and Mom do, but I am,” she says. Wow, Paige. How cool you and Mom are! You’re like the coolest Soviet spy BFFs! And when you’re not out spying for the Motherland you’ve never seen, you get to hang around with your cool Mom and your other granny girlfriend and drink and giggle about having sex! What a great life! I know it’s what every young woman dreams of doing…when they’re not flipping out and beating up gross boys at the bar. Ugh. [I noted with some evil glee that when Claudia and Elizabeth were doing their level best to impart another history lesson about the bad old days in the Soviet Union – Millions killed! We traded sex for food! We ate rats! – all Paige wanted to do was drink and giggle about sex. All those lessons about dear old Russia are so, so not sinking in. Paige just wants to be cool like her cool Mom. The end.]

Sadly, I think the show meant for the bar scene to be some sort of empowering, Me Too type girl power moment for Paige, but that entire scene made me cringe. Paige isn’t a badass just because she’s been taught how to fight. She’s an incredibly messed up young woman who doesn’t know how to function in a normal life.

Sorry Teacups! You were a quirky, sometimes endearing, sometimes annoying couple, but now you’re just roadkill. I hope their fate isn’t meant to foreshadow the fate of the Jennings. Speaking of the Teacups…the agent that was guarding Gennady sure did get a good look at Elizabeth. Wonder if we’re going to see another suspect sketch of Elizabeth hanging on the wall at the FBI any time soon?

Am now officially worried about Oleg. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and Tatjana was mightily scorned.

Random thought: I loved that when “Jim” called Kimmy to tell her that it was all over, Philip wasn’t wearing the Jim wig and disguise. It reminded me a lot of when he took off the Clark wig and showed Martha his true (Soviet spy) face. Of course, with Martha he did that in order to bind her to him even more tightly than before. This time, he unmasked himself to set Kimmy free, just as he set himself free.

Edited 2018-04-26 05:58 (UTC)

I had the vibe that even with the... whatever it was she drank beforehand, that Paige was more than a bit buzzed when she was reacting to what Claudia was saying, and Claudia herself was kind of being a bit darkly humoristically blasé about her experiences, so Paige didn't really grok how serious Claudia's situation actually was, and that kind of fed into her questions to her mother too. I think if she had she would've been a lot less giggly and a lot more somber (she usually isn't loud normally).

Edited 2018-04-26 06:37 (UTC)

They drank a shot of olive oil to 'coat their stomach' before drinking the vodka. I've never heard of doing such a thing but then, I was never prone to drinking too much in bars and getting in fist fights.

A little part of me is hoping that the whole drinking shots whilst reminiscing about the bad old days was actually a set up so that Claudia and Elizabeth could gauge how well Paige holds her liquor (answer: not at all). And maybe they'll compare notes later when Paige isn't around and decide to wash her out of the spy game because she clearly loses her cool after a couple of drinks.

I doubt it, but it would amuse me. Elizabeth already admitted to Philip in her tossed off comment that Paige can't do the job. Whether she is ready to truly believe it, Elizabeth knows that Paige as spy isn't working out.

They drank a shot of olive oil to 'coat their stomach' before drinking the vodka. I've never heard of doing such a thing but then, I was never prone to drinking too much in bars and getting in fist fights.

It's totally one of those silly tips you'd get in college that would of course not really work. They ought to have just told her to eat a lot of bread before going out and ordering club soda and pretending he was alcoholic.

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quantumreality - 2018-04-29 18:09 (UTC) - Expand

Drinking tips

sistermagpie - 2018-04-29 18:30 (UTC) - Expand

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alley_skywalker - 2018-04-30 08:36 (UTC) - Expand

drinking tips

treonb - 2018-04-30 10:04 (UTC) - Expand

Re: drinking tips

jae - 2018-04-30 11:45 (UTC) - Expand

Re: drinking tips

treonb - 2018-04-30 12:19 (UTC) - Expand

I like the way it was ambiguous - he certainly wonders if he was, but Elizabeth seemed genuinely happy before coming out with the ludicrous plan.

Yes it is ambiguous whether or not Elizabeth set out to honeypot Philip in order to get him in a good mood, or whether she was just lonely and missed being close to him. Both are probable. It seemed too convenient to me: let's have sex before I drop this bombshell, repugnant request/demand on you.

Yeah, I thought he definitely made the connection. It was way to quick. She wakes up the next morning and is immediately back to smoking and wearing her depressed uniform. Philip says he slept well for the first time in a while, she's still the same. Then she lays this terrible plan on him.

Also, I don't know if this was intentionally, but I couldn't help but note that Philip was wearing a white tee shirt in the scene. He's wearing the same thing in the scene where Elizabeth announces they're going to have sex for the first time. Don't know if that was intentional, but I can't help but make that connection. It's not like it's something Philip wears a lot.

Also, I liked how Philip gave a happy little "brrr" when he went back in the house while Elizabeth just stands out there in her sweater smoking and being numb.

Re: Honeypotted?

lovingboth - 2018-04-29 17:29 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Honeypotted?

sistermagpie - 2018-04-29 18:04 (UTC) - Expand

I see it in context of who gets hurt in this episode. You can - and Elizabeth would - argue that Gennady deserved what happened to him, but with the exception of the bar pair, no one else did.

I'm not sure the second guy in the bar deserved much. He hadn't done anything to Paige than have a jerk friend and she sucker punched him.

The funny thing is, if Paige had been anyone but Paige, we'd be writing it off to her reacting in the heat of the moment and not really being overly concerned with her emotional maturity. She's 19 and she's just been creeped on and been grabbed in an unwelcome way. Then the boy who likes her tries grabbing her in a similar way, unintentionally retriggering her fight reflex.

So all said, people would buzz a bit about the badass quiet college chick who laid a couple of guys out flat, and then it would die down.

But Paige the spy is supposed to act in ways that maximize her forgettability, not her memorability, and while I think Elizabeth was being a bit excessively paranoid, she does have a point in that if Paige goes back round to that bar, people will remember her face, and if, later, she does get an FBI/State/whatever internship, the last thing she'd want is for her background check to flag up anything unusual, and a bar fight where she showed unusually crisp fighting tactics would maaaaaybe ping on the radar.

Re: Bar scene

sistermagpie - 2018-04-29 18:30 (UTC) - Expand

Previous post was me, PS.

Did Gennady really deserve being murdered like that? Didn't Claudia say that he had to be killed just to spare the government back home from embarrassment if people ever found out that a well liked hockey player had defected? He was killed simply to preserve the illusion that Russia is a happy, shiny place.

I suspect the number of 'really deserve' murders in the series is rather low - there have been plenty of people in the wrong place at the wrong time, including Sofia - but Elizabeth certainly thinks killing him was justified.

I think Elizabeth would say Sophia did too. She's the one who was the original traitor.

I think Oleg is safe, but this is a foreshadowing of Elizabeth's reaction when she finds out what Philip's just done.

He's not there for the GRU any more, he's not there for the Philip and Elizabeth "us", and he's not loyal...

I'm holding on to a shred of hope that when Elizabeth learns what Philip did, it'll be enough to shock some sense into her and make her realize that 'the Cause' isn't worth sacrificing her family. There's a reason why the showrunners chose to have the dying artist acting like some sort of Greek chorus, reminding Elizabeth of what's really important. To me the artist is symbolic of Elizabeth's own sub-conscience shrieking at her to wake up before it's too late.

Loved her literally saying "There's got to be someone in there who can SEE!" But even in her big glasses that magnify her eyes, Elizabeth can't.

Well, really it's kind of more complicated because Philip is working for Arkady, the head of directorate S, who is protecting Gorbachev, the actual leader of the party. Elizabeth is working for people in the middle of that who are planning a potential coup.

If this were a Robin Hood story, wouldn't Philip and Oleg be the Merry Men here?

Sadly, I think the show meant for the bar scene to be some sort of empowering, Me Too type girl power moment for Paige, but that entire scene made me cringe. Paige isn’t a badass just because she’s been taught how to fight. She’s an incredibly messed up young woman who doesn’t know how to function in a normal life.

And again she reacted to Elizabeth's actually very important advice by rolling her eyes and saying it wasn't a big deal. She just doesn't go back to that bar again.

She also turned Elizabeth telling her not to try to get information from that intern into Elizabeth telling her not to sleep with him. How does she still seem incapable of following this very simple line of thought? She couldn't do it with Matthew either.

It's a shame that after Elizabeth actually said the words that Paige wasn't cut out for this she backtracked again and rewarded Paige with that drinking afternoon. It was implying that the real problem was Paige "learning from her mistakes" by teaching her to hang out in bars like a spy by drinking olive oil.

Except the real problem isn't that she drank too much, it's that she doesn't understand the danger she and her family are in and thinks this is all about her being cool. Even the next day when she was sober she was defending her actions, lying about events to pretend she had no choice and brushing off the danger. It's just one bar she can't go to anymore!

By making it about teaching her to drink I think Elizabeth rewarded her for her actions, frankly.

Random thought: I loved that when “Jim” called Kimmy to tell her that it was all over, Philip wasn’t wearing the Jim wig and disguise. It reminded me a lot of when he took off the Clark wig and showed Martha his true (Soviet spy) face. Of course, with Martha he did that in order to bind her to him even more tightly than before. This time, he unmasked himself to set Kimmy free, just as he set himself free.

Someone else said that too--they also said they thought the camera angles changed at the end when Philip was really speaking to her as himself, warning her not to go to a Communist country.

I laughed when Paige essentially had a fit and yelled essentially, "You're not the boss of me!!11!!11!!" at Elizabeth. LOL. I think every teenager on the planet has said that at some point.

Of course, Elizabeth is pretty much Paige's case officer now, so technically she is Paige's boss as well as her cool spy Mom.

Re: Philip and the camera angles: I'll rewatch that scene tonight after work and check the camera angles. I'm always interested in how directors stage scenes. I was thinking about that scene again today and comparing/contrasting it to the unmasking with Martha. Here with Kimmy, he unmasked himself but purposely did not let her see his real face just to further drive a wedge between her and him.

I find it interesting that twice now with Kimmy, Philip hit a point where his own conscience would not let him act. He's done all manners of horrible things to various people, but the first time around he refused to sleep with her because she was underage, and now he refused to put her life at risk. Philip does anything he can to avoid hurting innocent people, particularly kids. We saw the same sort of impulse in him when he got so outraged at Tuan's plot to goad that Russian kid into committing suicide. Elizabeth may be able to justify this sort of damage in her mind as being Cold War collateral damage, but Philip really can't.

Where is Elizabeth's 'line in the sand'? She's got to have one. She is human. There's got to be an act or sacrifice that she simply cannot bear. What will it be and what might she do when/if it finally happens?

Where is Elizabeth's 'line in the sand'? She's got to have one. She is human. There's got to be an act or sacrifice that she simply cannot bear. What will it be and what might she do when/if it finally happens?

They let her off the hook by having the kid be asleep. She didn't even have to worry that he'd recognize her in her disguise.

Re: Elizabeth's limit

saraqael - 2018-04-27 01:04 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Elizabeth's limit

andy73 - 2022-06-21 13:41 (UTC) - Expand

So I rewatched the phone call scene (in fact I rewatched the entire episode) to pay attention to the camera angles and you're right. The camera circles around and draws closer to Philip as he's speaking, and it ends with a very cool shot (though out of focus) of an American flag waving in the background. That's pretty wild. The scene is telegraphing that Philip has chosen sides.

Speaking of the camera work, when I rewatched the episode, I noticed that the camerawork in the 'morning after' kitchen scene between Philip and Elizabeth is especially good at emphasizing what's happening between the two. I mentioned it in my Twitter. They're in the same frame together outside. When they enter the kitchen, they're still in the same frame, but the scene itself is divided: they're on one side, the empty house is on the other side. The camera starts to divide them to opposite sides of the frame when Elizabeth first proposes her plan. By the time Elizabeth describes Philip taking Kimmy to Bulgaria, he is almost entirely out of the scene except for the tip of his hand. It cuts to a reaction shot of him and she is almost entirely out of the frame. Then they come back into the same frame when Philip says, "There's got to be another way." Elizabeth starts talking and the camera starts dividing them again when she says, "It all comes down to this." Then they're back in frame together though neither looks at the other when she says, "All you'd have to do is go on a trip." They go back to separate frames when Philip objects and says, "She's just a kid." They stay in separate frames until Elizabeth says, "You're done." The very last shot in this scene is of Philip looking reproachfully at her. Elizabeth is just a dark blur.

That was really terrific staging, IMO. As I said on Twitter, you could watch this scene with the sound off and still know how troubled these two are by the way the camera divides them. There are only a couple of points in the discussion when they're actually together; otherwise they are pulling apart and just reacting to each other.

This is so cool!

Re: Camera angles

saraqael - 2018-04-29 02:18 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Camera angles

jae - 2018-04-29 02:58 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Camera angles

saraqael - 2018-04-29 03:09 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2018-04-29 18:01 (UTC) - Expand

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jae - 2018-04-29 02:56 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Camera angles

treonb - 2018-04-29 22:53 (UTC) - Expand

hen his own arrogant, idiot daughter

I mean…Paige is mostly young and sheltered and manipulated by her mother (a professional manipulator) until she doesn’t know what way is up and which way is down. I never liked this storyline much because I didn’t really understand how Paige really…got here. But, as some people here have said, I think it makes sense, that Paige has never felt close to her mother. Elizabeth could be pretty awful to her and their relationship sucked until…well, this. And suddenly they’re connecting and doing important things and she has a direct, clear way of making her mother proud. And Elizabeth is taking full advantage in all of that. It’s Elizabeth who’s extremely reprehensible and blind in this situation, imo.
As for the bae scene…I don’t actually think it was supposed to be empowering, especially not in a Me Too sort of way. More like…Paige loosing control and instinctively falling back on what protective mechanism she has as opposed to thinking of the big picture. And I thought it was pretty ironic that she gets told off for using the self-defense skills she initially started learning for the very reasons she used them for – to stave off rapey creepers.

Edited 2018-04-30 08:43 (UTC)

I agree that Paige has been masterfully manipulated by Elizabeth. I don't think that Elizabeth herself fully realizes the depth of what she's doing to Paige. Elizabeth wanted Paige to know and love her for who she really is (fierce Russian warrior for universal justice). Paige desperately wanted to find out why her family felt so fake so that she could feel normal and feel like she fits in somewhere. Both of these desires, IMO, have collided and created this disastrous situation. I don't blame Paige at all for being what her parents created. I freely admit that at the start of the season, the presentation of 'Badass Superspy Paige' irritated me because it was so implausible. Then I realized that this was entirely the point with Paige and I became quite sympathetic to her again. Paige thinks she's invincible and on top of the world when in fact she's drowning in all of this right before our very eyes and no one on the show will tell her otherwise.

Elizabeth is blinding herself to what's obvious to every single viewer: Paige is not suitable for the spy life. The fact that it's this obvious to everyone tells me that this is the message that the showrunners actually intended to impart.Everybody is railing at Paige for being such a failure as a spy, but she's being written this way for a reason. The person who won't admit that Paige isn't cutting it is Elizabeth. (Though she did quickly admit it to Philip in a tossed off comment meant to deflect him.) Paige is out doing her own research on espionage and also out doing her own thing because she's now intensely in to being a spy. Except that she's not. She has no idea about the physical danger she's in because Elizabeth continues to shelter her. She doesn't appear to care at all that she's committing treason simply because she gets to spy with her mom and it's so cool and glamorous.

Paige may have started learning self defense in order to conquer her fear of 'rapey creepers' as you say, but as a spy in training, she ought to have known by now not to draw any undo attention to herself. That's the entire point of living as an illegal: you blend in and never draw attention to herself. From the way that Elizabeth reprimanded her, it's clear that this isn't the first time that Paige has been told never to do anything that might make people question who you are.

I actually agree with you that she lost control and reacted in a panic. I should have been more clear that my 'Me Too-girl power' comment was more directed at the social media response that I saw to this scene, and not to the scene itself. I saw so many 'badass, cool, Me Too!' Paige comments on social media that I felt like I was watching a different show from all of those viewers who thought that it was so great that Paige hit those guys. It wasn't great. It was the opposite of great.

I think that Paige is a walking disaster waiting to happen. She thinks she found the truth about her family but she's only been told a bowdlerized fairy tale version of that truth. I stand by my comment of calling her an arrogant idiot but I don't intend that in a mean way. She's in way over her head but the one person who could save her - Elizabeth - won't tell her the truth because she's too busy lying to herself about Paige. Elizabeth is feeding Paige's illusion that she's doing something secret and grand but she's not. Paige thinks that shadowboxing in the garage with nice cushiony pads on the floor makes her a badass, but it doesn't. Philip tried to show her (without telling her) that she has no idea what she's actually up against, but I don't know if the message sunk in. He's still playing by the Center's rules: Paige belongs to them now. If he really wanted to free her, while he had her in a choke hold he should have said, "Ask your mother how many people she's slept with and how many she's killed. Then come back and ask me the same thing. And then maybe think about why I'm not in to this any more." He's still just as complicit as Elizabeth in lying to Paige.

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Honeypotted?

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Bar scene

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Hell hath no fury

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Paige and Jim

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Paige losing control